By Adam Swiderski
The epic struggle between game makers and pirates has yielded some crazy copy protection methods over the past decades.
Here's how far we've come in the realm of security...
Recently, Bioware technical producer Derek French caused a stir by announcing that PC versions of both Mass Effect and Spore would utilize online SecuROM copy protection that required the games to automatically re-check with a central server every ten days. The idea was roundly and vigorously panned by the gaming community, to the point at which EA chose to relent and alter its plans rather than suffer the public relations backlash.
All's well that ends well, and yet this minor kafuffle is only the latest salvo in a war that has been waged for decades between those who produce and sell the games we play and the software pirates who would see them copied and illegally distributed. It's made copy protection a hot topic of discussion lately in PC gaming. Its roots, however, reach all the way back to the dawn of computer gaming as a pursuit.
The Early Years
Software piracy has always been a thorn in the side of the gaming world, but in the beginning, it was less of an issue than it is today. The industry was in its infancy, and the idea that games would someday be the kind of multi-billion dollar behemoth that would be plagued by the effects of widespread piracy was unfathomable. The PC was still primarily a business and productivity tool, and what gaming experience it could offer often came in such primitive formats as magazine-based code that had to be manually typed into DOS.
What's more, pirating and sharing games back then was hard. Software at the time tended to ship in formats such as cartridges, which were incredibly difficult for anyone without an engineering background to duplicate, or audio cassettes, in a time when the dual cassette deck had yet to achieve widespread market penetration.
All of this changed with the arrival of the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Suddenly, data could be copied easily and without degradation via PC from one media to another. The benefit to developers was great in terms of the amount of information and complexity they could now sink into their games, but they were also faced with a generation of gamers who were learning how easy it was to copy and share among their friends.
The response was to enact some of the earliest and most primitive forms of copy protection. Games would sometimes ship on diskettes with holes laid out in precise locations. Others wrote files to a disk after installation that would make it impossible to install that game from the same disk a second time. Needless to say, these methods made the experience for legitimate users complicated and problematic, and more than a few fled to the then-gestating online communities of BBSs for custom-made hacks and software duplication applications. It was time for a more creative solution.
The Era of Doo-Dads and Decoders
Fortunately, the games industry is creative, and thus it was that the offline copy protection was born and flourished. One of its most prevalent forms was an in-game quiz that would require gamers to refer to the manual for specific information - you'd be asked, for example, to enter the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 14. Some titles took a punishing approach to this little Q & A: SSI's Star Command required a documentation check prior to each in-game save, while Master of Orion would respond to a failed manual check by gradually becoming so difficult that it was impossible to win. Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra's King's Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a "Game Over" screen.
Other developers eschewed straight manual checks for in-box tools and items that were more integrated into the games with which they shipped, especially once photocopiers became more accessible and allowed would-be pirates to quickly and easily duplicate documentation. LucasArts made a name for itself in this field, utilizing such gems as the Monkey Island series' multi-level code wheels. Other games, like Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shipped with the kind of color-masked text one would find in old-school decoder rings; the documents could not be reproduced by the photocopiers of the day and would require the application of a transparent red plastic filter in order to get at their contents.
The ultimate evolution of offline copy protection was the integration of in-box contents into the gameplay, itself. Infocom was one of the earliest practitioners of this methodology. Famous for the novelties it would ship with its titles, the adventure games company would go so far as to have the likes of Zork Zero ask you to refer to a packed-in scroll for clues to its final puzzle and respond with quips like "Good luck, Blackbeard" to incorrect answers. LucasArts' aforementioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tie-in included a very well-done "Grail Diary" designed to mimic Sean Connery's item of the same name in the movie, and made excellent use of it to help guide the player through the game, a tactic it would duplicate with 1990's Loom and its Book of Patterns.
Pack-ins and manual checks were certainly tedious, at times, and often took the gamer out of the experience while they rifled through manuals or boxes of tchotchkes, but one could argue that they added an element of fun to an industry necessity that is rarely anything but a chore for the end user. Still, they weren't foolproof, and as the cost of game development rose, elaborate packaging and its usefulness as a copy protection mechanic fell by the wayside. This coincided neatly with the spread of a new form of media: The CD-ROM.
The Era of Shiny Disks
The arrival of the CD-ROM meant that games that previously required dozens of floppies could be shipped in a single jewel case, and opened the door for new multimedia possibilities in game development. But it also brought with it the CD-RW drive, capable of duplicating massive (at the time, anyway) amounts of data quickly and easily. It was a software pirate's dream.
The response to this development from a copy protection standpoint was technological in nature. The first salvo was the use of unreadable disk sectors or other hidden files that could not be read or accurately duplicated by the software used to copy CDs at the time. Of course, this was rapidly made obsolete by the development of software that could read and copy an entire disk. So software companies turned to schemes like SafeDisc and early forms of SecuROM designed to make copies of discs that used the systems unreadable.
Unfortunately, many of these methods run up against one of the fundamental issues that has caused PC games developers headaches over the years: Compatibility. Simply put, it is impossible to create a mechanism that is going to work with every system setup or optical drive on the market. This has led to controversy when gamers who legitimately purchased titles like The Sims 2 and BioShock have been unable to play them thanks to the incompatibility of their hardware, anti-virus software, or other system components with CD-based copy protection.
None off this, however, has engendered quite the outrage brought on by system-side copy protection solutions like StarForce. Very difficult to crack but also difficult to remove on uninstall of a game, these mechanisms have been accused by outlets from the lowest tech blog to gaming comic Penny Arcade to CNet of executing a malware-level invasion of a system on which they are installed. Given that there are documented cases of system performance degradation thanks to remnant StarForce code, it's easy to see why solutions like this have become extremely unpopular even among consumers who have no interest in pirating or sharing games.
A Series of Tubes
No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media - including games - is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, 'Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-'90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.
The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it's been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA's efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we've heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games - store-bought or downloaded - to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it's certainly not going to be the last we'll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.
And then, there's the interesting case of Stardock, makers of strategy titles Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. Stardock has taken the bold stance that it does not plan to take any steps beyond the use of a unique serial number to copy-protect its products, a decision that has endeared it to fans but that famously led a StarForce forum moderator's posting of a link to a site where an illegal copy of Galactic Civilizations II could be easily downloaded. The game has sold well despite its lack of defense against piracy, but one has to wonder whether such a strategy would work for a larger publisher producing more mainstream titles.
With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel.
